Recent reviews by Otisabi

The beauty of Dying Light is that there's always something happening. The slums and their surroundings aren't the most evocative of settings – although they can be strikingly beautiful – but they feel alive in a way that is rare in expansive glossy gamespaces. As you wander the streets and leap across the rooftops, you'll often hope to be distracted from whatever humdrum errand the dreary cast have set for you. The game never fails to deliver. Whether it's a lone zombie, stumbling through the streets like the lost member of an apocalyptic pub crawl, or a random gang of marauders armed to the teeth, there's always somebody to play with.

Fancy leading those marauders into a massive crowd of zombies? You can do that and then watch as all hell breaks loose. Perhaps you'd prefer to taunt your enemies from a rooftop, lobbing knives, throwing stars and molotovs from on high? Fair enough, but don't be surprised if they manage to find a way onto your perch. There might even be a nearby trap that you can remotely trigger, causing an explosion that brings every dead thing that can crawl or walk into the vicinity.



Dying Light is consistently entertaining. As soon as the overlong prologue is out of the way, the plot mostly takes a backseat and leaves you to speed off in whatever direction you choose. You could become a scavenger, sneaking through buildings to find junk that can be transformed into deadly weapons, or you might enjoy exploring the rooftops, and trying to gain access to the secluded and secure nooks and crannies of the world. If you're as amused by the satisfyingly solid melee combat as I am, you could spend an hour or two squishing skulls.

Each of those activities will help you to progress through one of the three skill trees – Agility, Power and Survival – and, as I did, you'll transform from a man capable of carrying sixteen large metal pipes in his pocket while leaping from one building to another, to a man capable of kicking zombies to mush while gleefully bouncing around the city like a deranged Zebedee. Did I mention that Dying Light is gloriously entertaining?

There's a catch. There's always a catch, and in this case you might be able to guess what it is. If you've ever played a game, or paid any attention to the kinds of games that people play, you'll probably be aware that Dying Light appears to have borrowed all of its bits from various places. It's Dead Island with a bit of Far Cry 3, plus some AssCreed parkour, and so on and so forth. Of course, at some level everything is an amalgamation of influences and borrowings, but Dying Light looks like a particularly obvious magpie, with a collection of shiny things plucked from elsewhere.



That does mean it's rarely surprising. Everything works as you probably expect it to but, on the whole, all of the parts work exceptionally well. There's no small amount of skill involved in the combination of all these elements. If I were to criticise the game for being derivative, I'd perhaps say that it feels more like craft than art, but it's certainly good, solid crafting.

I'll move onto the most original aspect – the day/night dynamic – in a few paragraphs, after covering the basics. Melee, which is the bulk of the combat, feels weighty and has some extremely effective hit locations. Thwack a zombie on the back of the legs and it'll buckle to the floor, where you can continue to pummel it, preferably aiming for the head, which will burst like a melon in a war. Strap a couple of batteries and a power cord to a weapon and it'll cause limbs to twitch as the corpse collapses. The violence is extreme and when I was splattering a shambler over a wall becomes just a little too amusing, I often had to remind myself that they're already dead. It's fine. I mean, I probably shouldn't find killing dead people quite as funny as I do, but it's definitely fine.

Physics have been improved since Dead Island and the use of vertical environments means you'll spend a lot of time pushing zombies off things. This is to be encouraged, as is climbing out of reach and then making a racket so that zombies on nearby rooftops decide they want to eat you and foolishly launch themselves into the air. I can honestly spend an hour just walking around and watching the way they interact with the world, confused and sometimes weirdly tragic.



All of that climbing and jumping is courtesy of the parkour system. It's – ahem – leaps and bounds above anything that AssCreed has ever offered. Ubi's series is fine if you want to drive up the side of a cathedral by pressing 'W' or pushing a stick forwards, but Dying Light's parkour is about precision. You'll need to target ledges to grab onto them, which means a lot of your ascents will be slow and thoughtful. Eventually you'll move fluidly from one foothold to the next, but it'll take time and mastery.

The physicality of your avatar's body is strong as well and while there are occasional oddities – most often, I grab a ledge a split second after seeming to have fallen past it – the sense of being present in the world rarely fades. Even though you're doing impossible things, your character never has the invincibility or biological get boosters of a superhero. Every action feels like it requires effort, even if climbing and jumping never seems to drain the stamina bar that a few pipeswings will diminish completely.



And then there's night time. A couple of missions in, I was ready to throw a tantrum about how the danger of the darkness had been wasted. It seems as if the switch to the city at night is going to be a scripted occurrence, for certain story missions only, but thankfully that's not the case. All the time that you're outside a safe zone – areas that can be unlocked by clearing of unlife as you explore – a timer is ticking down, and eventually you'll be warned that you only have a few minutes to get to safety. That can lead to mad scrambles and desperate mistakes. Nothing worse than being pinned down by a crowd of hungry corpses when you need to be two blocks away, tucked up in bed in a brightly lit compound.

At night, you see, the real monsters come out to play. Capable of beating you in a race and equal to your climbing skills, the Volatiles are Dying Light's true horrorshows. You can run from them, pressing 'B' to glance over your shoulder as they chase, but that's only advisable if there's a safe zone nearby. They'll catch you eventually. Instead, you should hide.

Night time is either a panicked chase or a stealth game. The Volatiles are marked on your map, vision cones and all, and it's possible to evade them as you make your way home. It's another borrowed element, I guess, but, like the rest, it's well executed. There are tricks that make the night less formidable but it takes a while to discover them. Until then, it's better to rest somewhere safe and wait until morning. Except, experience points are doubled at night, so there's a reward at the end of all that risk.
Dying Light is the Frankenstein's monster of AAA games, an undead craft project made up of scavenged parts. As with the monster, however, Techland's latest is more than a shambling, stitched up chimera. The movement and melee feel solid and convincing, and although the world isn't as varied as I might have liked, it's a fantastic playground for thousands of emergent scenes, from panicked horror to improvised farce.

If you're looking for a new twist on ghoulies, ghosties, long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night, look no further than Ghost Master. Sick Puppies' real-time strategy game stands horror-game traditions on their heads, swapping the spooks and scares of Resident Evil and Silent Hill for supernatural management duties reminiscent of Dungeon Master. It's a great novelty, first of all, but it's also a real success in terms of gameplay, thanks to outstanding scenario design and an irreverent sense of humor.

Some of the haunting stunts you can pull are straight out of Ghostbusters.
Some of the haunting stunts you can pull are straight out of Ghostbusters.
The core elements of Ghost Master are simple. Reverse the stereotypical ghost story and you have a pretty good idea what this game is all about. Unlike in your garden-variety horror game, where you wander the halls of a haunted house waiting to be frightened into a fresh pair of BVDs, here you're some kind of dead civil servant (insert "are there any other kind?" or similar joke here) in charge of the rattling chains and disembodied footsteps. Problems in the small town of Gravenville have attracted the notice of the Haunter Committee, and you're sent to set things right by generally scaring the bejesus out of the flesh-and-blood types.

You do this by recruiting a team of ghosts for each scenario. This spook squad is drawn from six categories--sprites, disturbances, elementals, vapours, frighteners, and horrors--named for the chief characteristics and skills of their members. The sprites class, for instance, consists of minor spirits who mess up electrical appliances, like the cogjammer gremlin and the ghostly spider, clatterclaws. Elementals features aether and earthwall, who have the capabilities of air and earth elementals, respectively. Horrors represents the worst of the worst, such as the mortal-possessing ghastly and the headless horseman. Every sort of spook that's ever made type B-positive run down the walls in a fright flick is at your beck and call here.

Using your team in the field is a balancing act. Ghosts must be fettered to specific objects, so you can't spread them all over the map. Gremlins have to be attached to electronic appliances, such as microwaves and televisions. Apparitions, shadows, and wraiths are stuck to murder scenes. Weatherwitches and headless horsemen are linked to thoroughfares like hallways and roads. And so on.

Role-playing concerns also crop up. While certain types of ghosts are necessities in some situations, there's a benefit to using the same spooks in multiple missions, because they gain experience and become easier to control. They can also be upgraded with new skills, which are purchased in the ghoul room with the gold plasm awarded at the end of each successful scenario. Managing your spook squad is about more than just picking the right ghoul for the job.

Few things will scare homeowners as much as revealing rotting corpses in boarded-up rooms.
Few things will scare homeowners as much as revealing rotting corpses in boarded-up rooms.
Regular plasm consumption is another issue. This is the sole resource in the game, powering your ability to manifest ghosts and all their spectral abilities. Overtax yourself and you can run out of this vital substance, a dire scenario that ends the current haunt and throws you out of the mortal realm. Plasm is earned by scaring people, forcing you to keep a focus on screams and shudders even when the scenario objectives involve something more subtle than driving residents out of their homes.

Even with these physical anchors and resource restrictions, a lot of moving around is required. For starters, your victims don't stand still. Humans in the game communicate in thought balloons and gibberish voices, much like those in The Sims, and are rated in terms of belief, terror, and madness. Build their belief that something out of the ordinary is going on and you'll be able to terrify them or drive them mad. Affect either of the latter categories through something like an eerie laugh, a chill wind blowing through a sealed room, or a ghost playing peekaboo, and the victim will flee, forcing you to adjust your tactics. They even have individual fears, like lightning or insects, which can be revealed with powers like know aura and then used to your advantage.

People will run out of rooms, go from one floor to another, and even dash into the backyard or street to get away from your ghosts, so you need to keep up the assault by locating new fetters. After a little time on each level, you'll get an idea of your victims' escape routes. The level design typically includes lots of locations where you can set up traps to keep mortals so scared that they soon run off into the night or simply go nuts. Needless to say, you can derive a lot of sadistic glee from this. Put a ghastly in a living room, a spook and a cogjammer in a kitchen, and a weatherwitch in the hallway separating them and you can watch your victims slowly lose their minds as they go from one spine-tingling jolt to the next.

Collect gold plasm and you can train your ghosts with different spooky skills.
Collect gold plasm and you can train your ghosts with different spooky skills.
The scenarios themselves are well designed and fairly plentiful (more than a dozen are spread across three acts). Most are more tongue-in-cheek than openly ghoulish, although there are lots of corpses to be unearthed amid the guffaws. All poke fun at movies and TV shows, both horror and mainstream. Scenario names include Ghostbreakers, Poultrygeist, and Phantom of the Operating Room, and plots have been lifted from movies like Evil Dead (faithfully adapted lock, stock, and Necronomicon) and Sleepy Hollow. Look closely at the names of your victims and you'll notice some surprises as well. The Haunting 101 tutorial mission, for example, sees you sending apparitions against Blair, Tootie, and their pals from the '80s sitcom The Facts of Life.

There isn't really an overarching plot, though the people you scare in one scenario often show up in another. You really do get the sense that you're haunting a small town. For example, the Hutz family you haunted in The Calamityville Horror and the kids you drove away from their frat house in Weird Séance show up in the Gravenville police station in The Unusual Suspects. The only problem with this approach is that Gravenville is a little too small, seeing as you have to haunt some places more than once.

The design goes beyond grade-school puns. Scenarios consist of a mixture of puzzles and straightforward rock-paper-scissors design elements, so that you're attempting to complete different objectives each time out. You scare jocks out of frat houses, unveil hidden corpses, assist university students with occult rites, convince a mob boss to believe in ghosts, frighten the locked-up criminals out of a police station, and so forth. Sometimes you even have to avoid scaring people away or driving them mad, as you need them in a lucid state so you can fulfill certain objectives. Puzzles are paramount, as the houses to be haunted always include fettered spirits that can be freed to join your ranks by accomplishing set goals. Some of these are fairly simple--to release Raindance from his toilet prison in the Evil Dead homage Summoners Not Included, all you have to do is clear some bees from in front of a Porta Potti, and to spring Sparkle in The Blair Wisp Project, you just need to start a campfire.
About the only thing missing from Ghost Master is a multiplayer mode, although it's hard to imagine how Sick Puppies could have incorporated such an option into a puzzle-oriented title like this. And the game isn't exactly any poorer for the omission of multiplayer features, since the numerous missions and impressive replay value will keep it on your hard drive for quite some time.

In Far Cry 2's chaotic world of mercenaries, gunrunners, and armed militias, you'll find yourself dropped into a dizzying web of shady clients and paper-thin alliances. All manner of names and faces are introduced during the course of the storyline, but the real star isn't anyone brandishing a smuggled weapon in search of blood diamonds; it's the daunting and awe-inspiring 50-square kilometers of African landscape that make up the game's open-world setting. Aside from providing the opportunity to soak up an amazing sunset, Far Cry 2's free-roaming terrain brilliantly harmonizes with the first-person combat. The diverse landscape and myriad environmental factors work alongside a wide assortment of weaponry to give you tremendous freedom to approach each mission. Combined with solid multiplayer, Far Cry 2's sheer breadth of action provides you with plenty of reason to stay lost in the African wilderness despite an underwhelming plot and the occasional sense of tedium in navigating from one location to another on the gargantuan map.

Far Cry 2 is quite the looker.
Far Cry 2 is quite the looker.
Far Cry 2's story is filled with potential. You're a mercenary working for a client who's sent you to an unnamed African nation engulfed in civil war, and your job is to take out a notorious arms dealer known as "The Jackal." He quickly proves to be an elusive figure, so you'll need to begin working for various warring factions that the Jackal has armed so you can trace the supply line back to your target. The two primary organizations at the heart of all this bloodshed are the militaristic UFLL and the revolutionary APR. You'll spend the bulk of the story working for these two groups, getting to know their power structures, and taking on all of the violent tasks they throw your way. Complicating things is the fact that your character has malaria, which means you'll need to occasionally play nice with the more ragtag Underground, the only group with the medical connections necessary to keep your potentially life-threatening symptoms at bay.

Each story mission can be played in multiple ways. There are 12 potential buddies randomly scattered throughout the storyline who you can befriend (nine of whom are available to choose as your silent protagonist), and they're often keen to tack on their own interests to the quests handed out by the UFLL and APR. Instead of just taking out a target, you have the option to earn extra reputation points by working alongside your buddy to first squeeze any remaining assets from the soon-to-be-deceased. This also earns you the ability to increase your level of companionship with that buddy. It's a neat reward, but it doesn't shed much light on their backgrounds. But that's par for the course; the main story is delivered in such a rushed, quick-and-dirty way that you never feel very involved in the game's overarching conflicts. The plot is less Blood Diamond than it is early Grand Theft Auto, a long roster of changing faces that scroll by far too quickly to capitalize on the politically charged setting.

Although disappointing for a single-player campaign that could easily drain more than 30 hours of your time, any shortcomings in the plot are mostly forgivable thanks to Far Cry 2's overall structure. The game is organized in a way that provides a daunting amount of freedom to explore, earn currency, and wreak havoc on the game's landscape and its denizens. It's all laid out in a manner typical of sandbox action games. Pulling out your map reveals a collection of icons that signify available missions and points of interest that you can meander toward at your own leisure. Among these are dozens of side missions that you can take on, with various forms of rewards. Delivering transit papers to trapped refugees earns you malaria medication, destroying rival convoys for gun merchants unlocks new weapons for purchase, and performing assassinations for mysterious voices at the other end of your cell phone rewards you with diamonds. You can also rough up militias stationed in small camps and turn their dwellings into your own safe houses. The side missions can feel a bit repetitive when played through in rapid succession, but they offer a great change of tempo when sprinkled throughout the main narrative. But what's most clever is how their differing rewards intermingle so wonderfully with your needs in progressing through the story: Malaria pills keep your HP and stamina up, diamonds buy you new weapons and ability upgrades, and safe houses provide temporary shelter to stock up and save your game.

With so much ground to cover, you'll be spending a lot of time driving, boating, running, and swimming.
With so much ground to cover, you'll be spending a lot of time driving, boating, running, and swimming.
The freedom of choice that goes with selecting which mission you want to perform carries over to how you execute them, and that's where Far Cry 2 really shines. There are a variety of factors that affect the way you approach each mission, from the number of people you need to kill, to the landscape, to the weather and time of day. If your job is to take out a key figure hidden deep within a militia camp in the jungle, you'll do well to take a nap at your safe house until nightfall and silently stalk your prey under the cover of darkness. If it's a windy day and you need to take out a bandit outpost in the dry plains, you can start a fire from far away with a flare gun and let the breeze and arid conditions collude to spread the flames toward their camp, finishing off the survivors with a sniper rifle. Need to clear out a bunch of scattered guards? Why not shoot an oil drum near an ammo stockpile and watch as the bullets erupt in every direction like deadly pieces of popcorn? Of course, you can also get up close and personal with pistols and machine guns, but the moments in which elaborately planned assaults succeed are some of the most gratifying points in the game. The whole process of staging an attack only becomes more intricate and rewarding as you slowly upgrade your safe house into a full-blown armory and unlock new weapon and vehicle abilities--all done through the gun shops.

Overall, Far Cry 2 is a game in which you can quite literally get lost for hours at a time. But that feeling of exploration is precisely what makes the game so much fun; your creativity never feels stifled when approaching a mission, and the game's overall structure of side tasks, friends, rewards, and upgrades is a diverse ecosystem rivaling the landscape itself. No matter whether you're a PC fan whose played through the similarly structured Crysis or a console owner new to the world of open-ended first-person shooters, you won't be disappointed by Far Cry 2.

A lot of games make a big deal out of player choice, but few in recent memory offer so many intricate, meaningful ways of approaching any given situation. You fulfill or dash the spiritual hopes of an idyllic society, side with slavers or their slaves, and decide the fate of more than one city over the course of your postapocalyptic journey through the Washington, DC wasteland. Your actions have far-reaching consequences that affect not just the world around you but also the way you play, and it's this freedom that makes Fallout 3 worth playing--and replaying. It's deep and mesmerizing, and though not as staggeringly broad as the developer's previous games, it's more focused and vividly realized.

Welcome to the wasteland.
Welcome to the wasteland.
This focus is obvious from the first hour of the game, in which character creation and story exposition are beautifully woven together. It's an introduction best experienced on your own rather than described in detail here, but it does set up Fallout 3's framework: It's the year 2277, and you and your father are residents of Vault 101, one of many such constructs that shelter the earth's population from the dangers of postnuclear destruction. When dad escapes the vault without so much as a goodbye, you go off in search of him, only to find yourself snagged in a political and scientific tug of war that lets you change the course of the future. As you make your way through the decaying remnants of the District and its surrounding areas (you'll visit Arlington, Chevy Chase, and other suburban locales), you encounter passive-aggressive ghouls, a bumbling scientist, and an old Fallout friend named Harold who has, well, a lot on his mind. Another highlight is a diminutive collective of Lord of the Flies-esque refugees who reluctantly welcome you into their society, assuming that you play your cards right.

The city is also one of Fallout 3's stars. It's a somber world out there, in which a crumbling Washington Monument stands watch over murky green puddles and lurching beasts called mirelurks. You'll discover new quests and characters while exploring, of course, but traversing the city is rewarding on its own, whether you decide to explore the back rooms of a cola factory or approach the heavily guarded steps of the Capitol building. In fact, though occasional silly asides and amusing dialogue provide some humorous respite, it's more serious than previous Fallout games. It even occasionally feels a bit stiff and sterile, thus diminishing the sense of emotional connection that would give some late-game decisions more poignancy. Additionally, the franchise's black humor is present but not nearly as prevalent, though Fallout 3 is still keenly aware of its roots. The haughty pseudogovernment called the Enclave and the freedom fighters known as the Brotherhood of Steel are still powerful forces, and the main story centers around concepts and objectives that Fallout purists will be familiar with.

Although some of that trademark Bethesda brittleness hangs in the air, the mature dialogue (it's a bit unnerving but wholly authentic the first time you hear 8-year-olds muttering expletives) and pockets of backstory make for a compelling trek. There are more tidbits than you could possibly discover on a single play-through. For example, a skill perk (more on these later) will enable you to extract information from a lady of the evening, information that in turn sheds new light on a few characters--and lets you complete a story quest in an unexpected way. A mission to find a self-realized android may initiate a fascinating look at a futuristic Underground Railroad, but a little side gossiping might let you lie your way to quest completion. There aren't as many quests as you may expect, but their complexity can be astonishing. Just be sure to explore them fully before pushing the story forward: Once it ends, the game is over, which means that you'll need to revert to an earlier saved game if you intend to explore once you finishe the main quest.

Thus choices are ruled only by your own sense of propriety and the impending results. For every "bad" decision you make (break into someone's room, sacrifice a soldier to save your own hide), your karma goes down; if you do something "good" (find a home for an orphan, give water to a beggar), your karma goes up. These situations trigger more consequences: Dialogue choices open up, others close off, and your reputation will delight some while antagonizing others. For example, a mutant with a heart of gold will join you as a party member, but only if your karma is high enough, whereas a brigand requires you to be on the heartless side. Even in the last moments of the game, you are making important choices that will be recounted to you during the ending scene, similar to the endings in the previous Fallout games. There are loads of different ending sequences depending on how you completed various quests, and the way they are patched together into a cohesive epilogue is pretty clever.

Fallout 3 remains true to the series’ character development system, using a similar system of attributes, skills, and perks, including the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system from previous games for your attributes, such as strength, perception, and endurance. From there, you can specialize in a number of skills, from heavy weapons and lock-picking to item repairing and terminal hacking. You will further invest in these skills each time you level, and you'll also choose an additional perk. Perks offer a number of varied enhancements that can be both incredibly helpful and a bit creepy. You could go for the ladykiller perk, which opens up dialogue options with some women and makes others easier to slay. Or the cannibal perk, which lets you feed off of fallen enemies to regain health at the risk of grossing out anyone who glimpses this particularly nasty habit. Not all of them are so dramatic, but they're important aspects of character development that can create fascinating new options.

The VATS system makes for some awesome-looking battles.
The VATS system makes for some awesome-looking battles.
Although you can play from an odd-looking third-person perspective (your avatar looks like he or she is skating over the terrain), Fallout 3 is best played from a first-person view. Where combat is concerned, you will play much of the game as if it is a first-person shooter, though awkwardly slow movement and camera speeds mean that you'll never confuse it for a true FPS. Armed with any number of ranged and melee weapons, you can bash and shoot attacking dogs and random raiders in a traditional manner. Yet even with its slight clunkiness, combat is satisfying. Shotguns (including the awesome sawed-off variant) have a lot of oomph, plasma rifles leave behind a nice pile of goo, and hammering a mutant's head with the giant and cumbersome supersledge feels momentously brutal. Just be prepared to maintain these implements of death: Weapons and armor will gradually lose effectiveness and need repairing. You can take them to a specialist for fixing, but you can also repair them yourself, as long as you have another of the same item. It's heartbreaking to break a favored weapon while fending off supermutants, but it reinforces the notion that everything you do in Fallout 3, even shooting your laser pistol, has consequences.

No matter what platform you own, you should play Fallout 3, which overcomes its issues by offering a deep and involving journey through a world that's hard to forget. It has more in common with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series than with previous Fallout games, but that is by no means a bad thing. In fact, Fallout 3 is leaner and meaner than Bethesda's previous efforts, less expansive but more intense, while still offering immense replay value and quite a few thrills along the way.

It ain't easy being the Antichrist. In adventure/puzzle game Lucius, you experience the trials and tribulations of being the firstborn son of the big red guy with the horns. As you might expect given the young lad's pedigree, when he suffers growing pains, they involve a sizable body count. Lucifer is a demanding daddy, who wants souls in exchange for building the tyke up with telekinetic powers. All this contributes to a grim but promising setting where your only goal is to figure out how to murder the folks on the devil's hit list. Unfortunately, this darkly innovative premise is not implemented well, due to a reliance on pixel hunts, and you're dropped onto the scene with just pop's orders to start killing.

The entire game has been liberally borrowed from the Omen series of horror films (so liberally that you wonder if lawyers are being put on retainer at this very moment). You take on the role of the title character, Lucius, who gets a visit from his infernal real father on the occasion of his sixth birthday on June 6, 1972 (which, of course, means that he was born on the auspicious date of 6/6/66). Daddy stops in to give the pale-faced, lank-haired little ghoul both gifts and marching orders. He has big plans for Lucius, and these can best be realized by the murder of, well, pretty much everybody who lives and works in the huge family home called Dante Manor.

You start off by simply locking a maid in the walk-in kitchen freezer, and then graduate to inventive slaughters such as cutting a butcher's head in half. If you're familiar at all with the decapitations and vivisections that made the first two Omen movies so striking back in the '70s, you'll know exactly what sort of Grand Guignol atmosphere that developer Shiver Games is going for here. Most of the game is creepy and understated, with Lucius haunting the halls of the old mansion, sometimes with just a flashlight to guide his way. A barely there B-movie script and mechanical voice acting make it tough to take the story seriously, but the kills make a real impression as they splash onto the screen with showers of blood and body parts. The game strikes a good balance between chills and gore that any fan of horror movies will appreciate.

It's not as if Lucius is just an average, everyday six-year-old serial killer, either. He possesses a range of supernatural powers courtesy of dear old dad. These get more powerful with every murder, so while you start with the basic telekinetic ability to toss around objects and turn on machinery (bad luck for that butcher mentioned above), you are soon enough launching fireballs. At the same time, Lucius is just a kid to his parents and the household staff. You might be plotting gruesome murders, but you still have to brush your teeth and clean up your room so mommy and daddy can see that you're a good boy (the one bit of effective black comedy in a game that is otherwise gloomy). Rewards for being so well behaved include such treats as a Ouija board that dispenses hints, though it's not clear how mom and dad got their hands on such trinkets.

Aspects of the gameplay are more off-kilter in reality than they seem when laid out on paper. The biggest problem is a lack of information. You're essentially greeted with the devil's instructions to start killing people right when the game begins, and are left to suss out how to go about doing this on your own. Tips are given about various special skills, like telekinesis, but the core aspects of the game are not explained well. And they really should be, because this is a unique experience that blends the murder-sim attitude of games like Hitman and Manhunt with point-and-click adventure tropes. Lucius can't just creep up on his kills. Instead, he needs to explore the mansion to load up his inventory with various items necessary to set victims up and finish them off. Lucius also has to sneak around. Getting spotted doing something odd by mom or any of the other characters that patrol the mansion results in instantly failing your assignment. This process makes sense when clearly laid out, but unfortunately, the developers didn't include tutorial killings to help you get a clear picture of your task.

As the old saying goes, the devil is in the details, and details abound in Lucius. Dante Mansion is a massive old place loaded with exhaustively detailed dens, living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, game rooms, bars, gardens, cellars, kitchens, and more. The sheer amount of care that went into the mansion's design is impressive. Pretty much everything is functional. You can pull open drawers in every desk, nightstand, and wardrobe in the place, and a lot of rooms come equipped with crucifixes that need to be flipped upside down before they drain Lucius of his Hades-spawned powers.


It all looks good, even though the visual quality is more functional than cutting-edge and the repetitive music can add a grating tone to the entire scene. Alas, there are some high costs to this visual appeal. First of all, loading the mansion takes am exhaustingly long time. Second, the cavernous nature of the home makes for tedious exploration and pixel hunting when looking for items required to pull off a kill. Feedback is often lacking. Certain puzzles lack proper clues pointing you towards the proper solution, such as overheard lines of dialogue that could nudge you in the right direction. Formidable leaps in logic have to be made all through your killing spree, making you wonder if the devil might have been better off giving Lucius a .38 and an alibi.

Also, though the mansion is enormous and absolutely loaded with all manner of furniture and people, there seems to be only one road to every murder. There is no way to freewheel through killings, or to concoct various nefarious plots. The sprawling setting is mostly wasted, because you can't make use of it to pull off inventive murders. Instead, you're stuck with a paint-by-numbers approach where you follow a set path of collecting items and triggering events that then kick off a brief cutscene of someone dying in a macabre fashion. This limits the game, especially if you come to it as a veteran of something like Manhunt, where you could murder victims in all sorts of creative ways.


Lucius blends frustration with aha moments where everything briefly comes together. While you take some morbid pleasure in walking around in the cloven hooves of a chip off the old Beelzebub, it is hard to fully enjoy figuring out how to send your victims on their merry way to hell. Playing a gaming adaptation of The Omen from the perspective of the creepy little kid is certainly an original concept that will carry you along for a while, but the underdeveloped and limited mechanics make it tough to see this horror story through to its conclusion.

Some games are easy to pick up and play. Others require you to learn, improving and developing skills as you go. The multiplayer-only Natural Selection 2 proudly sits in the latter camp. The latter camp isn't for everyone, and that's okay. But as long as a game is designed well enough to allow you to learn, improve and develop, it's always great to see one push the envelope and not rely on the most tried-and-tested formulas. Often, these games end up being some of the most refreshing, the most celebrated titles around. Natural Selection 2 is one such game. It isn't the most accessible game on the market, but if you put in the time, this deep and complex strategy/shooter hybrid rewards you with plenty of engaging variety and lots of thrills.

It's important to stress from the outset: if you're a first-time player, your initial enjoyment of Natural Selection 2 will be entirely decided by how prepared you are to learn new gameplay systems. There's no interactive tutorial; all the game offers is a series of lengthy demo videos. These aren't ideal, they don't open within the game interface, and it's a lot to take in should you choose to watch them all back to back before diving in. That said, by far your best bet in picking up Natural Selection 2 is to play Natural Selection 2. The way the game is structured makes it very easy to learn by doing. Certain servers (highlighted in green) are defined as rookie servers, providing a great place to get to grips with the game's many systems, ideally under the watchful eye of a more experienced commander.

The commander's role forms the RTS portion of the experience. Here, one player controls resource management, base building, and upgrades. The commander directs units, issues orders, and tells the team where to go and what to do. The best rounds of Natural Selection 2 see the commander using full voice chat, communicating with the team vocally as well as through the interface. A good commander isn't the only thing that can make NS2 appealing, but having a competent leader goes a long way towards making the game more enjoyable.

Thankfully, it's usually easy to find plenty of welcoming, communicative matches; after all, NS2 is very much a team game. There's absolutely no incentive to ostracize or punish teammates for a poor performance. The best commanders know that to win, communicating with and nurturing your team is key. The best way to learn how to play commander is by not playing commander. Take a hands-off approach, stick to one of the ground troops, and it's very easy to pick up what makes for a successful--and unsuccessful--commander. On top of that there's Explore mode, which lets you play around in the RTS interface with a vast amount of resources, and tool tips for each structure.

A lone skulk, waiting to pounce. Clearly, it's been watching Alien.
A lone skulk, waiting to pounce. Clearly, it's been watching Alien.
The commander is just one role, however, and the rest of the players have a diverse array of options to choose from. There's a lot here, and chances are, after a bit of experimentation, you'll find at least one aspect of the game you really click with. The best way to approach the game isn't to think of it as having an overall learning curve, but a number of smaller spikes; focus on one aspect of the game, and you'll learn plenty by way of observation while doing so. Thankfully, the game's been designed exceptionally well to allow this. Every facet of both the Frontiersmen (marines) and Kharaa (alien) sides is important. It's very much like Team Fortress in that respect: every role has its place and purpose.

The roles themselves vary considerably depending on which side you're on. The Frontiersmen are the more traditional of the two; rather than focusing on individual classes, weapon and equipment upgrades allow you to outfit your character depending on your playing style and the demands of the situation. Through the commander's resource management, new weapons are made available, including shotguns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, and mines. Then there's the prototype lab, allowing the research and purchase of jetpacks and exos (think the loader from Aliens, but with the ability to punch and shoot). On top of that there are numerous other research possibilities. There's the arms lab that provides permanent armor and weapon buffs as long as the lab remains active, a robotics factory that allows for the creation of commander-controlled support units, and various individual objects such as teleports, enemy detectors, and sentry guns.

Of course, nothing comes for free, and all these goodies can only be bought with resources. For both teams, resources take the form of team resources and personal resources. Team resources are used exclusively by the commander to build, upgrade, and generally get things done. Personal resources are used to buy the items on the ground. Both types of resource are generated based on the number of collection structures your team has put in place (extractors for marines, harvesters for aliens).

Explore mode lets you test out the commander role without sending your team to their doom.
It's unlikely your team will be able to afford every single bit of kit, so you have to choose your purchases carefully, and this adds a layer of strategy to all aspects of the game. A good commander will have a game plan, focusing on specific research and development to shape the team into a suitable side. Fancy building up a ton of defenses and sending a strike team to meet your opponent? Or perhaps aggressively expanding your base across the map, choking the opposing team and cutting off their potential resources?

The Kharaa side, on the other hand, is a lot more focused on class-based progress. There are five alien types, with the skulk leading the way as the basic, free unit, and the rest requiring increasingly more personal resources to evolve into. You have the gorges, almost-cute hippo-like creatures that act as healing/support classes, who can also build hydras (sentries) and clogs (defensive walls). They can also powerslide around on their bellies. Then there are the lerks: flying units who specialize in precision strikes and utilize poison to get at their foes. Next up is the fade, the stealth specialist that excels in speed and rapid damage.

Kharaa vs. Frontiersmen: Whoever wins, we lose (unless we're on the winning team).
Kharaa vs. Frontiersmen: Whoever wins, we lose (unless we're on the winning team).
Finally there's the most expensive unit, the onos, a huge rhino/gorilla-like creature with vast amounts of health and armor, capable of rampaging through even the most well-defended marine base. The onos is perhaps overpowered right now, and can often turn the tide of a match in a way that can occasionally feel cheap, although watching a team of skilled marine players rapidly take down an army of four onos is a moment of beauty. (Unless you're on the alien team, of course. Then it's the stuff of nightmares).

Natural Selection 2 isn't without its problems, however. For starters, despite the fact they're large and well-designed, there are only six maps, although between free updates from developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment and community-designed maps, there's potential for expansion here. Then there's the barrier for entry; there's no denying that when faced with a genre mash-up comprised of a bunch of classes and no hands-on tutorial, some players are going to be put off before they get started.

Like it or not, times change. When Max Payne last appeared in a game in 2003, he blasted his way through countless enemies with reckless abandon, aided by his signature ability to slow time and deal graceful death. Today, reflecting modern sensibilities and perhaps his own age, Max takes things slower and makes judicious use of a new cover mechanic. Yet the addition of this contemporary element doesn't mean that Max Payne 3 plays like every other third-person shooter. Far from it. With its gripping narrative, brutal violence, and fantastic implementation of Max Payne's bullet-time ability, this is a distinctive and outstanding game through and through, and it's easily a worthy successor to the Max Payne games that preceded it.


Wherever you go, there you are. It's a truth Max Payne knows better than anyone. Fleeing his New York life to take a job working security for a wealthy family in Sao Paulo, the hard-drinkin', pill-poppin' Max finds that his demons come along for the ride. Though the details of the plot add up to your typical story of conspiracy and corruption, of the rich and powerful preying on the poor and helpless to become even more rich and powerful, the writing, acting, and presentation elevate this tale well above a boilerplate video game crime story.

It's hard to stay ambivalent once you see the horrors being suffered by the innocent here, and you'll likely want to see Max's quest for vengeance through to its conclusion just as badly as he does. Max reveals a complexity here not seen in earlier games, as he hits rock bottom and must either stay there or face his demons head-on and make himself anew. Other characters, too, reveal a surprising humanity. You might be tempted to write off Marcelo, the youngest brother in the wealthy Branco dynasty Max is hired to protect, as the shallow playboy he often appears to be. But in moments of disarming honesty, he reveals to Max a depth that lies beneath the facade he presents to the world.

Cutscenes use multiple moving panels to pay homage to the graphic-novel-style storytelling of previous games without feeling beholden to it, and the considered use of blurring and other visual effects echo Max's state of mind, perhaps making you feel as if you're the one who has been hitting the bottle a little too hard. James McCaffrey does an excellent job reprising his role as Max, bringing a wider range of emotions to a character who has previously often been one-note. The writing is terrific; Max's world-weary wit is as bone-dry as ever, and as he ruminates on things like loyalty and loss, much of what he says has the sound of hard-earned wisdom. Subtle touches throughout the game make Max seem convincingly alive, such as the complex look that crosses over his face at the start of one stage when bloodshed seems inevitable; it's as if he dreads what's coming, but does his best to mentally prepare himself for it.

Live by the gun, die by the gun.
Live by the gun, die by the gun.
Max Payne 3 has far more sunlight and color than earlier Max Payne games, but the menaces Max faces here are at least as dark as those he's faced before. The locales Max has to gun his way into or out of are alive with authenticity and detail. Nightclubs throb with dance music and light shows; children play soccer in the favelas; run-down hotels are packed with leftover junk from their earlier days of luxury. And it's not all tropical locations and bad Hawaiian shirts for Max Payne here; a few great flashbacks that take place in Hoboken, New Jersey, reflect the snowy weather and urban atmosphere of earlier Max Payne games, as well as Max's previous fashion sensibilities, and connect his new life with his old one.

Though some things may have changed for Max Payne, one thing that hasn't changed is his ability to blow bad guys away by the hundreds. Three aiming options for the campaign let you customize the gunplay to your liking: hard lock takes much of the challenge out of things, snapping on to the nearest enemy; soft lock sticks to enemies once you've got them in your sights; and free aim leaves it all up to you. Regardless of the option you choose, shooting in Max Payne 3 feels terrific. This is partially due to the game's unflinching violence. Bullets visibly tear through bodies, leaving holes that spurt blood as your enemies die. Each encounter with a group of enemies ends with a bullet cam, showing your final, fatal bullet soaring through the air and striking its target in grisly detail, and giving you the option to pump excessive, unnecessary ordnance into the poor bastard. It's a cathartic and satisfying way to end each firefight.

Bullet time, the defining mechanic of the Max Payne series, lends gunplay a cinematic intensity that remains exhilarating from the start of the substantial campaign until its finish some 12 hours or so later. When bullet time is enabled, you can see every pellet that bursts forth from a shotgun, every bullet that whizzes past your head. Windows break apart beautifully; concrete shatters to reveal the rebar underneath; and all other sorts of believable destruction to the world around you takes place as you and your enemies try to gun each other down.


Max may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with him.
Bullet time slows your enemies down significantly, letting you aim and fire faster than they can respond. But despite the significant edge this gives you over your foes, they are no pushovers. They make smart use of flanking tactics, so you need to stay aware of what's happening on all sides, and, yes, you need to make effective use of cover. There are still situations aplenty where an old-fashioned head-on approach can get the job done, but by and large, you need to approach combat in Max Payne 3 a bit more defensively than in past games.

Max's vulnerability, and the feeling of danger that accompanies it, makes combat much more nerve-racking than it was in earlier Max Payne games, but it does come with a downside: Max's signature shootdodge has suffered. You can still leap through the air in slow motion like a John Woo action hero, attempting to blow your foes away before you land, but because your enemies also make good use of cover, there's a good chance some of them won't be vulnerable to your airborne assault, and as you get up from the ground after a shootdodge, you're something of a sitting duck. The result is that you may end up using shootdodge from time to time not because it's a particularly effective tactic but because, risks be damned, it just looks so cool.

There's a great variety of guns to use in Max Payne 3--all manner of pistols, shotguns, rifles, and submachine guns. Max can still dual-wield weapons but, in a great touch, any larger weapon you grab is carried in his left hand, and if you opt to dual-wield your smaller weapons, he has to drop the bigger gun. (After all, where is he going to put it?) Max also has a number of terrific, hard-hitting melee attacks at his disposal, which knock enemies helplessly to the ground and then let you fill them full of lead. Great sound design supports the impact of the action. Gunfire sounds as fierce and deadly as it looks, and simmering percussion comes to the forefront in battle, a fitting accompaniment to your escalating pulse.

It’s a stirring game, The Masterplan. Despite Marsh’s glowing appraisal of the Early Access version, I’d held back, slightly put off by the busy cartoonish graphics (I prefer my heists minimalist and clean), so I didn’t play until I had release code. The tutorial level, which holds your hand through the world’s easiest jailbreak, is a little clunky. It asks you to do very little but still managed to confuse me, although I’ll put that down to the text prompts that detail the instructions appearing so slowly that I rushed ahead and called the police to the site of my own jailbreak because I didn’t know how to punch a window.



While my own ineptitude and desire to hurry through the opening might be party to blame, I don’t think it’s a strong opening. As much as anything else, it combined with the graphics to convince me that the game was going to be a lighthearted series of romps rather than the cleverly constructed series of capers that unfold. There is a buoyancy to the ventricles but The Masterplan is a game in which you’ll frequently coerce civilians into violent acts and the threat of extreme violence and murder is your greatest weapon.

The ability to threaten people with a gun – real or fake – is what I’m going to concentrate on here. It’s my favourite aspect of the game and underpins a great deal of the other systems.

Basically, if one of your characters is in possession of a gun, you can drag a line from them to a point on the level to make them wave their gun in that direction. They’ll hold it in position, covering the area, and AI characters who are both in the area and have line of sight of the threat will surrender. At this point, they can be controlled by the player but if the line of sight or the cover-cone of the gun are removed, a circle around the threatened character starts to shrink and if it vanishes, they’ll run for the exit/nearest phone.



All of that can lead to situations in which you have one of your crew trying to cover a foyer full of people, the shrinking timers on each one becoming the plates that he must spin. The tension and desperation of crowd control is communicated instantly. Passing control of the potential victims to the player is a superb choice, converting them from annoyance to resource. I’ve created situations where two members of my gang are just far enough apart, across corridors and rooms, that I can just about force a civilian to dash between them before he regains composure and flees. I use him to ferry items between one and the other and as a distraction.

When civilians are used as distractions or shields, there is always the possibility of an accidental shooting. I don’t feel good about myself when somebody gets caught in the crossfire between my felons and the fuzz. In fact, I’m never happy when anyone has to resort to violence. My Masterplan doesn’t rely on murder or even violence. There’s always a Masterplan B though, and that occasionally involves a tripped alarm, a shootout in the guardroom and a death-dealing dash to the escape vehicle.

The Masterplan has more in common with SWAT 4 than with Monaco’s rhythmic arcade of colour and coin-pills. It’s a game built around cleverly designed maps and credible NPCs. The locations for your heists (unlocked by discovering flyers and plans in earlier levels) are convincingly real. NPCs arrive and leave, nip out of their office to go for a piss, and generally make you feel a bit guilty when you interrupt their lovable routines with the ugly promise of violence and death.



Thankfully, the game never becomes grim. That light-hearted cartoon style shows its worth, allowing the game to lean heavily on the cruelty of crime in its mechanics without ever tipping into grotesque displays of violence or pain. This would not be the place for such things – the game asks you to experiment and play with life so often that it has to retain the feel of a toybox. And it does so, handsomely. The panic of real-time control is countered slightly by the ability to slow the game down (practically pausing the action) but even in full flow, the game provides plenty of time to plan and think. Until an alarm is tripped or the police are called, most situations can be calmed while improvised escape routes are formulated.

It wasn’t long after I attacked the officer that I was killed with a shotgun. A fight had broken out near the cell block entrance and my friend Tapper and I decided to use the opportunity to gain some prison cred by battering the guard who came to break it up. It did not go well. My character, Pratt, is now lying in the morgue and I have become Tapper, inheriting his body in a ghostly fashion. I am locked and restrained in my cell. Through the bars I can hear the faint sounds of a riot. I am sad to be missing out.

This is Escape Mode, just one of the features added to Prison Architect [official site] for its final release. After four years in development and alpha the game is finally out. Is prison the absolute LOL sesh it is made out to be in popular television show Orange is the New Black? Or is it more like the Midnight Express? Come with me, into this dark corner of the holding cell, to find out Wot I Think. Please mind the vomit.


You may not have heard of Introversion’s prison sim, but only if you yourself have been in prison for the past half a decade. It is a game in which you lay down a prison piece by piece, from the armory and the cells, to the toilets in the cells, to the pipes that connect the toilets to the sewer, and so on. It plays a little bit like traditional management games and a little bit like PC gaming legend Dwarf Fortress. Thankfully, the creators have forgone the ASCII horror of the latter and given it a cutesy comic book art style. This sometimes clashes with the strangely serious tone of the introductory chapters, which see you execute a prisoner on death row by electric chair. These opening “missions” are called a campaign but they are more of a tutorial, easing you in and letting you play around with optional tasks at the close of each level.



And if ever a game needed a tutorial, it’s this. PA in its final form is complex, refreshing and sometimes frustrating. It will take you hours to get to a state of semi-comprehension and days to fully understand every little cog of the machine. In fact, I still can’t brave the use of logic switches or pressure plates, which can be used to micromanage every tiny movement of your prisoners and staff. I have just about got my head around installing a viable back-up generator and plumbing system, for when my primary power centre explodes and several janitors burn to death (this has happened twice).

That brings us to the core of what makes Prison Architect so appealing. Things can and do go wrong. A recently added events system throws disasters at you while you build. So you may be in the middle of scheduling a drugs programme to relieve addicts of their dependencies when suddenly the mayor calls you and tells you that a news story has broken about visitors smuggling heroin into a nearby prison, and we can’t be seen to be complacent. Shut down your visitation rooms or face fines, he will say. And you will look at your prisoners, trapped in their cells, shouting about their families, and wince.



Sometimes multiple things will go wrong at once. A fire broke out in the central power hub of my facility, knocking out both water and power to the maximum security wing. It was 2am in the morning and the firefighters I called in worked through the night to douse the flames. But at the same time, the mayor called me and told me casually that I was to remove all the weights benches from the prison because of public pressure. In my mind, I threw the phone to one side and thought: “I will do that later, for God’s sake, we are on fire here.” But as the dawn broke, power and water had still not been restored to the maximum security wing. The kitchen staff were unable to cook breakfast and as the prisoners woke up and roamed from the showers to the canteen, all they found were empty serving trays. The riot began almost at once. Five chefs were murdered.

Before I give you my review, I feel it is necessary to give a background about myself. I got Paladins in closed beta a while ago, when it was relatively new. I found it through a twitch stream and the streamer gave me a key, at the time I didn't realize how easy it was to get one, but was thankful regardless. I installed the game, played it, but was turned off quite quick due to my low fps. It was a few months later I got back into the game, figuring out the fps problem. I started really enjoying the game, and became a mildly competitive player participating in a few ESL matches and Summer Circuits under the Organization Voltage. I mainly played Bomb King, Drogoz, and for lulz, Pip. However, shortly after me and my bud Eclips3 were picked up, the Organization let the Paladins branch go, and we were ultimately a group of 5 players. We all went our separate ways shortly after, besides me and Eclips3.
[Why I quit]
A few weeks after, CB30 was released. I was so hyped for the update, and as soon as I could I downloaded it. I joined a game, and for the most part, was disappointed. There were some good things about it, which I will mention. However, the cons heavily outweighed the pros. Things I didn't like about CB30 include:
Removal of the Old maps - Without the big, open, maps, the game just didn't have that Paladins feel to it. They replaced them with new, smaller, more fast pace combat maps. That was a little disheartening imo.
The TTK - Dear god, I could write about this for hours. The TTK (Time to Kill) was severely lowered, making it almost impossible to escape when caught off guard. Before, a player had time to use his mobility ability, get behind a corner, rejuvenate health, and either fight back or regroup with the team. With the new TTK, that simply wasn't possible.
Mounts - One iconic thing about Paladins were the mounts. They were used to get from the base to the objective quicker, and were also used as a third person view to look around a corner. With CB30, those were taken out and you were very limited with your mount. Instead, they added portables and the mount time was forced meaning you couldn't get back on after it automatically unmounted you. They took a very unique thing in Paladins and watered it down, when no one asked for it.
Now there were obviously good things about it. I will unintentionally contradict myself with some of the good things I put about it, but I am merely saying they were good concepts, not that I liked them.
Makoa - Many people will say Makoa was a copy from Roadhog in Overwatch. As much as people want to compare the two, you can't expect games with a similar genre to have "inspirations" from the other if you will. Makoa is a unique character that has many unique abilities providing fresh gameplay and something different.
New UI System - Was way more designed, fluid, and less buggy than the previous UI. Props to them.
Faster Paced Gameplay - Although I didn't agree with it, it did seem good on paper. The biggest competitor with Paladins is Overwatch. Maybe to draw in more people they changed the fps style to a faster pace, lure in the people who couldn't afford Overwatch? Although the older players heavily shunned upon it, the new gameplay style could have been fairly worked with and made more fun, and that's where things got better.
Obviously, the cons heavily outweighed the pros, and I simply didn't see Paladins anymore. I saw a poor man Overwatch, despite (to my belief) Hi-Rez definitely didn't want to be compared to Overwatch. The games are significantly different, Overwatch is an FPS with MOBA elements, Paladins is/was a MOBA with FPS elements. Since I didn't see the game that way, I quit playing for a long time...
[ Open Beta Review]
And then, months later, I see Paladins has been released on Steam. And within 5 days, the game reached the top 3 F2P Games on Steam Store. Even 8 days after release, it is still top 3. However I doubt there is a chance it will top TF2, Paladins will just stay at the 3rd spot. With so many downloads, I was a little curious if the game got better. I made a post a few days ago wondering if it was worth downloading from Steam, and the answer went along the lines of, "with the growth of players, it's worth checking out again." I was curious, and decided to test that curiosity. As soon as it was downloaded and updated, I loaded the game. The UI was very impressive and dynamic. It was a little confusing at first having not played so long, but it was fairly easy to understand. I found a game relatively quick, something I didn't notice back when I played so long ago. The champion screen was also innovative, something I was fond of. I noticed competitive mode was locked until 12 or more champions were master 4, and despite me having so much experience in the game, I only focused on a few characters, which I was a little glad about considering so many have changed. Note I have tried every champion so I knew how they played and what they were good at. Wanting to try competitive mode, I immediately hopped on champions I never played much. I started with Grohk, and since the last time I played him, he changed completely. He is definitely not as big of a damage dealer than what he once was, but more of a support character and healer. I definitely dig the change. More characters worth noting that I now like in which I didn't like before:
Barik - Didn't like the feel to him, seemed to be a character that lacked compared to others. However, he is particularly fun now and with the TF2 skin you can get for him, a lot more new players are trying him out.
Ruckus - By far one of the worst champions I've ever seen. When I used to play, no one played Ruckus as, like Barik IMO, lacked so much. Had a slow windup for his rapid fire that barely dealt dps, felt really immobile, just a relatively boring character. He has changed a lot and is actually really good if you know how to use him, and he is a really fun champion now, something that I like.
I have tried others but I'll leave it at them two. The fps style is more or less the same as CB30, again, a style I wasn't fond of. However, it definitely seems they polished it making it way more fun and exhilarating to play. Mounts are back with some restrictions, TTK still somewhat low but definitely improved since CB30. The game felt like a sped up version of Paladins and didn't have the same Paladins feel I had prior to CB30, but this new Paladins has a version I like more than the old style. It is fast paced, but still slow. It is still relatively quick to kill, but still slow enough to escape, regroup, and fight back. Full on 5v5s are also a lot more exciting with the narrow map designs. I can definitely say I like the way Paladins is now, it has that vibe the old Paladins has, not necessarily in the way the game plays, but the aspect of fun. Coming back to Paladins was definitely a decision I don't regret and with the amount of players its raking in, I can't wait to see where it will go next. If you read the entire thing, I personally thank you. Leave your opinion in the comments and leave some discussions, I'm down to converse about Paladins. If you want to add me my IGN is: isotopeee
[TLDR]
Skeptical about coming back to Paladins after quitting when CB30 was released. Despite skepticism, came back anyways and wasn't disappointed. Innovative gameplay, UI, more players, and much more made the game more fun. Glad I came back...